Presentation application programs provide functionality for creating and delivering audiovisual presentations. Typically, presentations take the form of one or more presentation slides. Each presentation slide can include numerous objects, such as text, photographs, lists, tables, charts, shapes, clip art, movies, and others. Presentation slides can be displayed on-screen and navigated through at the command of a user in order to deliver the presentation.
Many presentation application programs provide functionality for animating and applying visual effects to the objects on each presentation slide and for animating and applying visual effects to the transitions between presentation slides. For instance, using the functionality provided by typical presentation application programs, a user could define a motion path for an object on a presentation slide. When the presentation slide is displayed, the presentation application program will cause the object to be animated along the defined motion path. A user may manually define other types of animation and visual effects properties to be applied to a presentation object in a similar manner.
Many presentation application programs also provide functionality for playing an audio file during a presentation. However, it has traditionally been difficult for a user to synchronize animation events within a presentation to interesting time points within an audio file. For instance, a user may want the animation of text and graphics within a presentation to occur as each main beat of an audio file is played. Users previously achieved this result by listening to the audio file repeatedly to identify the interesting audio events within the audio file, and then manually aligning the start times of the slide show events with the manually identified audio events. This is a tedious and time-consuming process that is frustrating to users and which, in many cases, provides results that are less than ideal.
It is with respect to these considerations and others that the disclosure made herein is presented.